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First-year graduate students Ben Hood (foreground) and Matt Rizk, who were drawn to UCLA by Weybu

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Three days before his deadline to decide where to attend graduate school, economics student Ben Hood said he visited UCLA and was guaranteed housing – a perk that made his decision slightly easier.

“If I didn’t want to come here, I’m not sure that guaranteed housing would have made the difference,” Hood said. “(But) it definitely made the decision a little bit easier.”

Hood now lives in the Weyburn Terrace apartments, a brand-new complex for graduate students run by the UCLA Housing Administration.

Used as an incentive to recruit some of the nation’s most competitive students, Weyburn Terrace has been home to widespread problems since it first opened at the end of July 2004.

Some of the problems include flooding in multiple apartments, insect infestations, faulty appliances, broken elevators and half-finished paint jobs.

Before the buildings were even completed this summer, university administrators used the complex to recruit top students.

Students, especially those coming from other states, often ask recruiters about housing arrangements because Los Angeles is so large, said Andrea Sossin-Bergman, assistant dean of admissions at the UCLA School of Law.

Sossin-Bergman said that students will not come to UCLA’s law school solely based on housing, but that having it helps make UCLA more competitive.

“They would like to live as close to campus as possible,” Sossin-Bergman said.

“We’ve never had that opportunity (before).”

But some students who said guaranteed housing greatly influenced their decision to come to UCLA said the university broke its promise.

“We move in here thinking that this is going to be no-hassle living, so that we can focus on our graduate studies,” Hood said. “And (we) turn around and this becomes this whole stressful part of our lives. ... I can’t wait to get out.”

Another student, Shawna Rasul from Cleveland, Ohio, said Weyburn Terrace helped sway her decision to attend UCLA’s law school instead of the USC law school.

“When I made the choice between UCLA and USC, obviously the housing and being close to school was a very big draw,” Rasul said. “The law schools are fairly the same. That’s when you start making decisions on things like housing and the availability of housing.”

But, like Hood, Rasul felt betrayed by the school’s promise of good housing.

The pictures and the blueprints that were sent to her about Weyburn Terrace looked amazing, but “it was almost tantamount to false advertising,” Rasul said.

Katrina Emmons said there has been no compensation for problems in her apartment and that Weyburn Terrace helped her decide between law school in New York and UCLA.

Housing is very difficult and expensive to find in a big city like New York, and the attractiveness of convenient, affordable housing at Weyburn Terrace helped pull Emmons to the West Coast, she said.

Director of Housing Michael Foraker said Weyburn Terrace was first envisioned over five years ago as part of Chancellor Albert Carnesale’s program to compete with high-caliber schools.

During the initial planning process, Housing took a general survey of graduate students already at UCLA, and Foraker said that affordability, convenience and privacy were the three most important housing issues for students.

“Those three considerations absolutely drove the interactions with our architect. Those three things were paramount in our mind,” Foraker said.

“What we think we’ve been able to achieve is one of the best housing projects for graduate students in the U.S.”

Victoria Ortiz, assistant dean of student services at Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, said housing and the cost of living is very important to all graduate students.

Tuition for law school is higher than that paid by undergraduates, and graduate students sometimes face tough budgetary constraints, Ortiz said.

She added that she is sure there have been admitted students who went to another school because they could not afford housing and the cost of living at Berkeley.

The total cost of school and living is important to students like 23-year-old Jordan Berman, who graduated from Brandeis University in May 2003.

Berman was recently accepted to law school at UCLA and said cost is one of many factors he will consider before he decides where to go to school.

Before he makes his decision, Berman is still waiting to hear back from law schools at Harvard, Stanford, New York University and Columbia – some of the schools UCLA directly competes with when recruiting graduates.

The hope is that guaranteed housing can help put UCLA over the top for some recruits like Berman, who are deciding between high-ranking schools.

Each graduate department is allocated a certain number of beds that it can guarantee to students. This year, the UCLA School of Law was guaranteed 59 beds, the David Geffen School of Medicine 130 beds and the UCLA College 291 beds, among others.

When completed, Weyburn Terrace will be able to house over 1,385 students.

“We have been somewhat disappointed in the past three years because we have not had specific housing that we could allocate to graduate students,” Foraker said.

Foraker and other housing administrators assured that the delays and construction problems affecting students at Weyburn Terrace this year will diminish and that the complex can continue to be used for recruitment.

Many students also said they have absorbed the temporary problems at Weyburn Terrace and imagine that issues such as temporary housing, unfinished or half-painted apartments and missing appliances will not be problems in the coming years.

“When we make an offer to a graduate student, we are competing with some of the best graduate schools,” said Tony Chan, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences.

“(Weyburn Terrace) is the competitive edge that we have when competing with (those) schools.”

Bruin staff Lee Bialik, Charlotte Hsu and Daniel Miller contributed to this story.